Man, wife married 61 years, die hours apart

Local couple raised six children over the years in York and Adams counties.

Richard and Nancy Trimmer are shown here at the wedding of their eldest son, Richard Jr., in 1972. The two were married for 61 years and raised six children locally, and died on Sunday within 12 hours of each other.
(THE EVENING SUN SUBMITTED)

That first chapter always starts simply, innocently enough.

This one begins near East Berlin, more than 60 years ago, with a young man whose buddy had a girlfriend over in West York. And wouldn't you know she's got this cute friend - Nancy. There's a whirling, spinning summer then, 15 miles across the countryside and over the county line again and again, a 20-year-old pedaling hard all the way - Richard.

There are breathless dates at the bowling alley, and a ring, and six children, and squirming grandkids and a life together, married and happy here for 61 sometimes-sparkling years.

Quickly enough there are memories, though, and all too soon a black-and-white picture of the couple, holding one another and smiling at his 80th birthday party last year. A picture shown one day this week on the newspaper's obituary page. Twice.

Richard C. Trimmer Sr., 81, died on Sunday, Jan. 8, at York Hospital after a brief bout with lung cancer.

He was the loving husband of Nancy A.(Hoke) Trimmer, who died on the same day as her husband - just 12 hours earlier.

"She didn't want to be in the house without him," the couple's daughter-in-law, Sue Trimmer, said on Tuesday. "It was all just getting too hard, so God took care of it."

Just before Thanksgiving, the family found out Richard Trimmer had lung cancer. It was in the late stages, and doctors said there was little to be done. They gave the retired trucker six months, at the most.

Advertisement

He had battled chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and renal failure, spending the last two-plus years tethered every week to a dialysis machine, and the cancer quickly took its toll on the depleted system of the 81-year-old grandfather of 10, the great-grandfather of a dozen more.

Eventually, he fell, and was whisked away to York Hospital.

His wife took it harder than anyone, Sue Trimmer said. The house just didn't feel the same. She wasn't comfortable.

Nancy Trimmer, 77, was soon in the hospital too, in Hanover, likely the lingering effects from open-heart surgery 10 years ago, and an aneurysm doctors could never fix.

And that's where fate found family this past weekend, gathered one evening at the side of that mother of six in Hanover, as her husband lay in fitful sleep in a hospital bed across the county in York. It was hard not to seek out memories of better times, Sue Trimmer said.

Think of the early days, when a young man from East Berlin mustered the courage to ask that girl from West York for her hand. She was a shy senior in high school back then.

And she smiled and said yes.

Think of the years they spent together in York and Adams counties.

Richard and Nancy Trimmer (Submitted)

They raised six children here - three boys and three girls - and rolling through the years and the tears were waves of easy laughter. There was knitting and jigsaw puzzles. Fishing trips and quiet hours spent with books. Children grew up, rode along with their father on his runs as a long-haul trucker, then moved away.

And think of the later years, when instead of staying home alone Nancy Trimmer would climb up in the cab with a hand from her husband, that rig rumbling to life again. The interstate looked a little less gray on those trips.

"They saw a lot of the country together," Sue Trimmer said.

But even the best stories move always toward an end. And on a cold Sunday morning in Hanover this week, that truck driver's wife died in her sleep, peacefully.

Family shed their tears there, and the clock on the wall said 12:25, and they knew another trip was necessary, over to York Hospital to deliver the news.

Yet when they got there later in the day, Sue Trimmer said, they found that retired truck driver surprisingly less lucid than he'd been just days before. The man who family feared would now have to be put in a home - a place he'd often made them promise he'd never be taken - was saying things no one could understand, and asking for water. Oh, and the clock in his room was stuck at 12:25.

Soon enough ice was brought, and someone tried to feed it to him carefully with a spoon. But he only looked off toward the ceiling, wide-eyed and unblinking as family leaned in close, listening.

"Pull me up," he whispered.

It continued that way for some time, the man's daughter-in-law said - family members trying to comfort with words, with water offered on a fluttering plastic spoon. But he just said it again, over and over.

Pull me up.

Please, please pull me up.

Children and grandchildren soothed, and held him just as close as they could.

But finally, Sue Trimmer said, there was a long, deep breath. A pause.

And then these words, from a man who served this country in wartime, and then saw it from a truck's cab with his wife by his side.

"Hold me tighter now."

A minute later he was gone.

Off to be with the woman he fell in love with 60-plus years ago, family said this week. Two people, unable to be apart.

Left behind in that cramped hospital room then was nothing more, nothing less, than this: a bed and a warm blanket and machines beeping somewhere far away. Children huddled close together, Sue Trimmer said, with tears streaming down.

And a pain that blurs and fogs old images of bike rides and bowling nights. The kind of pain that melts away over time, and eventually leaves behind something else entirely.